Khari > Recent Status Updates

Lady Macbeth seems to be quite the malicious lady.

And here I am again, surprised by how much Shakespeare has permeated our culture.

Epic Indie's song Bring Me Back to Life quotes the three witches from Macbeth. I wonder if they did it on purpose?

It's just very interesting to read someone's predictions of what would happen to the comic market vis a vis the internet in the 90s.

He was wildly wrong in lots of ways: Speed of the internet, reading pacing, panel development, etc., but he hit the nail on the head with other predictions, ie, online shopping for comics having them delivered to your door. Behold amazon.

Well, to be fair, he's writing this in the age of Dial up internet. It was really slow and frustrating.

It's very fast and easy now. :D yay progress.

Yeah, so traditional layouts don't work, so? Artists invented new ones to match the new medium, why is this a problem?

...but I'm also a pragmatist, the net has democratized all literature. I can get millions of comics and thousands of books at the tip of my fingers thanks to the net, and while the tactile experience is not the same, free easy access digital, still beats out the expensive, takes time to access tactile.

I wonder if this guy looks back on what he wrote with embarrassment?

At the time of writing it did take $10,000 to get decent computer illustrating tools, but now a smart pen costs...$5-20? It's not out of the reach of the poor classes he is defending.

It's also interesting that he's pointing out how anti-technology Americans are when he's writing anti-technological things. Don't get me wrong, I love me my analog

Well, this analysis didn't age well.

He basically said that the net would never be democratized because computers were too clunky and couldn't be taken onto buses, so web comics would never be a working class thing...

Behold, the smart phone. Behold 5G and LTE. Behold the wonder that is Comixology or Pikkoma, millions of comics on a screen, in your hand, wherever you go.

My how the world has changed.

I must have really liked the quote about freedom of speech, because I tried to grab it again before noticing I'd already put it into goodreads.

Also, America hasn't changed either. We are still way too competitive. Apparently in 1924, the USA team paid the taxi drivers more money than any other country, so there were no taxis to take athletes to the field (there was no Olympic village either so people stayed all over the city). The British contingent was forced to hitch hike to the arena.

Not very sporting of us, USA.

It's good to read history, it makes you realize that nothing has really changed, including the climate.

Everyone's complaining about how hot it is and how the temperature is rising. It was 45 degrees celsius (113 F) for the 1924 Olympics...in France.

A good comparison to 100 years later in 2024 where it seems the highest it reached was 36 C (97 F)...in France.

Maybe we're just worse at handling it?

"Many comics would make poor novels, though they are acceptable comics, and in this case, the difference is due to the drawings. The reader of comics not only enjoys a story-related pleasure but also an art-related pleasure, an aesthetic emotion founded on the appreciation of the exactness and expressivity of a composition, pose or line."

most positive aspect of comics, presented as the most negative.

Yes. Comics is primarily dialogue, but that's makes them a great venue of research! It's a written form, meaning that it is permanent and unchanging, and yet it reflects the spoken language of the its time. Speech, unless recorded, is ephemeral, difficult to study. even if it is recorded it's difficult to study, comics is a perfect in between medium.

"For the French, the balloon presents...various disadvantages: first, they place the text inside the image, thus imprisoning the verbal content withing the visual system; then-most importantly-they limit the text to simple dialogues and direct enunciation, drastically reducing the amount of description and literary expression."
Annie Renonciat as quoted.

Goodness, perspective changes everything, that's the...

"Although comics have been in existence for over a century and a half, they are still suffering from a considerable lack of legitimacy."

Quote from Jung in the Foreword

"Just as people can catch measles and scarlet fever from one another, so can they catch the ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. The more people live together in heaps, the less each individual counts, and the more he or she will be inclined to take his or her cue from the collective rather than pursue an individual idea."

The other interesting thing about this book is the introductory discussion of the theories behind the contained research. They combine postmodernism and Marxism together. Then they also say that poststrucutalism and postmodernism were nearly impossible to tease apart as of the 80s. It's 2024, how is it that no one in recent publication has figured this out?

What makes Scott Mcloud reductive and unsubtle? The fact that his work is read and understood by people that aren't professors or researchers? The elitism!